I slept at 2:20 AM and woke up at 12:50 PM, more than ten hours of sleep. I felt it more agreeable for me to spend these hours playing computer games, browsing the web for Grand Theft Auto V news and modifying the code of my website for a printer-friendly page. And not after a wink do I realize that I have done, all the things I can think of doing. Now I sit, placing my feet on the half-opened drawer of the cabinet, staring at the Microsoft Word with gunk seemingly in both of my eyes, and reading the email from Varun stating that the email I sent from last semester led Rai into academic probation. Rai failed all the courses for last semester, and did not at all contribute to our Society and Economy presentation. And I recall that he is a parliamentarian of the Undergraduate Student Government. The day I was elected as a member of the financial committee, the only time I showed up for the USG meeting, he questioned me how I can contribute to the USG. I said, no, I cannot. And he abstained in vote.
Chinese hackers are engaging in a DDoS attack against GitHub, the largest in the site's history. The attack redirects unsuspecting website visitors to the two pages of GitHub that contain the source code of a mirroring site and offer translation of the blocked New York Times articles. I am a participant. Every time I went to the pirate e-book site, there will be the notice "Warning: the site contains malicious JavaScript" roughly every two seconds, each meaning my traffic has been redirected to GitHub once. So I closed the page and secretly vowed never to use Baidu's service again, whose statistic engine is the origin of the attack. Although I know that vow won't be kept for long - from time to time I still have to use Pan to offline-download torrents. Not only me, to be truthful, but also several friends of mine who find the Pan quite useful in a quasi-legitimate way. I have always had an often-violated principle of only using sites that are censored by the Great Firewall, because it indicates dignity to someone who's neither a dissident nor wholly agrees to the Chinese government.
Curious though, the more I contemplate about my insistences - keeping writing despite the absence of inspiration, making the blog almost dilapidated but pragmatic, listening to piano and metal punk at the same time, visiting only websites blocked by the Chinese government, suing PayPal for a self-supposed unethical conduct, the more I feel a fictional importance exhibited by the preoccupations and disillusionments that are my reality. If human history is known for the aristocracy and its derived commiseration for the anonymous, palaces and grandiose constructions to testify the aspirations of the few, then mine is the resignation of the commiserated, and the ruins and shadows of the un-archeological, of the crude and of the ephemeral. Out there are only my once-existent footsteps on the once-real path of my university, of the cracking floor of my apartment, of the bike lane along the once polluted river of my middle school, and of a progressively unthankful present of the past. I move chronically along, chronically past things that are destined to over-last me in a reserved, un-uttering way. And I'm merely their decoration.
I'm endowed, amongst everyone else, an interesting ability to deify my own emotions, and at the same time to diminish them when they are ordinated amongst those of the others, such that when I am frightened, by staring into the darkness or by not having the capability to steer the future, I instantly un-frighten myself on the contemptible epiphany of other people being frightened in the same way. I pity those whose life is mundane and real and whose dream is probable and near. For unlike those whose life is extraordinary and whose dream is remote and improbable, the disappointment for the sagacious is more tenable. And at the same time I pity myself.
The sun went out briefly as I took a bathroom break to pee, leaving behind a blue, crystallized sky. My girlfriend, who was watching Chinese entertainment show, took a picture of the landscape to send to her mom. I, who neither has a will of taking any picture, nor, if I actually took one, want to send it to my mom, resumed typing on my laptop, and possibly, only possibly, apply for a room next semester in the southern side of the College Nordmetall building, facing the sun.
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Daylight Saving Time has already started for two days. Yet the clock still appears more credible than my sense of the time elapsing. The majority of my day was spent, unsurprisingly, hugging with girlfriend and killing around in the Battlefield 4 game - I successfully amassed more than a hundred kills with less than thirty deaths, and won the "Speed Killer" title multiple times, but my level count has merely progressed for one. The amount of labor and depression I've taken, compared to the actual reward I received, truly testified how shallow my way of living is. It is a shallowness both contracted and enlarged by the amount of people who have the level 140 instead of my 38. The world, at least the virtual gaming world, moves laterally. It is now near the day's end. During the day I was disappointed about being neither shocked by the news of a war breaking out, nor dumbfounded at a new scientific achievement - both of these take time to actually materialize, yet information age has engineered me in such a way that I am accustomed to, and even anticipate, bizarre and grotesque occurrence on a daily basis. During the night I'm no longer disappointed. I went to the kitchen for some fried paprika and tomato egg soup by my girlfriend, and returned to immerse in the new update announcements by DICE LA. Solving no problem, creating no prospect, gaining no weight nor losing any, drinking multivitamin tablet and disgusting girlfriend over persisting but trivial issues, I proudly declare the day in vain and wipe my ass and take my shower.
